


an unrelenting constancy

by stelian



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 04:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14783750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelian/pseuds/stelian
Summary: Once upon a time, the world was whole. Peaceful. And then one angel decided to create the stars, while another became jealous and plunged half of the world into eternal darkness, the other half into eternal sunlight.A few thousand years later, four lost souls and three wandering spirits reunite the dark and the light.{or; a vague Hadestown/Razia's Shadow fusion au that requires knowledge of neither, in which crows stop at nothing to find each other.)





	an unrelenting constancy

**Author's Note:**

> The universe and plot of this fic are both loosely inspired by the musicals Razia's Shadow and Hadestown. While I highly recommend listening to both, knowledge of neither is required to understand. (More notes on the worldbuilding are in the end comments).

_ They say that a great scientist knit the world together in a few days. His creation was basic - an ocean, a land mass, and a small mountain that he sat on to watch over his world. He was lonely, so he created his children - the angels - to populate and liven the world. They created music, they created art, they created dance and love and nature and beauty.  _

_ It was peaceful. No one fought, no one ever raised their voices.  _

_ It was beautiful. _

_ It was ephemeral. _

* * *

_ i. _

Inej is to be married in a few days.

She smooths the lines of her dress, wishing she could pluck the little shimmers out of it. The sheer  _ decadence  _ of it makes her sick somewhere inside. Outside, she can hear the riots. Food is short, and the rains across the mountain have prevented the import of manufactured goods. People are starving and  _ dying _ , and she, a simple circus girl, is about to marry a close relative of the royal family. 

It had been a normal day - she’d been performing as usual, bounding acros the wire, and whatever it was about her had caught Dunyasha’s attention. The girl was wealth-blind and insensitive but somehow madly in love with her.

The rich hadn’t been thinking straight since the prince disappeared that one day.

The marriage is harmless. She can smile, and blush, and stammer over words that imply her ignorance. She can be the beautiful girl on an adorned arm, if it will help her get where she needs to be. As far as Dunyasha she’s a poor girl honored to be in love with her. 

But circuses don’t run without their secrets, after all, and Inej is the master of all of them.  _ It’s the acrobats you look out for _ , her father said with a grin once.  _ They’re always above you somewhere _ . She’s long ago perfected the art of sneaking through corridors and fitting herself into the smallest of spaces where she’ll never be found. Secrets are profitable.

“Wedding jitters?” a voice says behind her. Inej turns, dropping her hands from the collar of her dress. 

No one is there.

Maybe she’s just nervous. 

_ii._

Jesper quickly realizes that being a lookout-turned-smuggler is a horribly boring job.

The posters made it sound like a lucrative job where he’d heroically shoot down border crossers (impossible, since most of the border is a sea), or constantly shuttle hopeless souls across the water (rare, because it’s so difficult to get the divide anyway). The reality is spending months of his life sitting in a tree, squinting up at the sky.

This close to the Light, you can sometimes see stars or a hint of light on the horizon. His mother would always tell him about the sun; his father would always tell him it was a myth while an undercurrent of pain sat in his eyes. Sometimes he wonders what it would be like, to stand in pure light. Sure, the string lights are bright enough, but they leave deep and ugly shadows. In the sun…

Jesper coughs into his sleeve. He’s far enough out that the pollution from the cities is only a hint of smoke. When he’d first come out here he’d been unable to breathe for days because the (relatively) clean air was too much for his lungs to handle after years of living in Ketterdam. Sometimes, the purity still gets to him.

He shifts his gave back down to the water, ignoring the stars for a moment. Monotonous or not, he still has to look out for crossers. Nothing in front of him. Time to look up-

Wait. Movement.

Jesper shifts forward, mindful of the creaking of the branch. Sometimes wood from the Light farms will drift down the border, giving him a few minutes of excitement. Wait, no, it’s definitely moving towards him- probably not wood.

For the first time, Jesper pulls standard-issue goggles over his eyes. It takes him a while to fiddle with the dial enough to be able to see, and then even longer to zoom in enough to see anything on the water.

It’s bobbing, like a swimming human would. 

He scrambles down out of the branch and runs to the shore, unsheathing his rifle. “Halt,” he says, voice shaking with excitement.  _ Finally _ , he can actually do something out here. “This is not an authorized crossover zone. I’ll have to escort you to authorities.”

The figure stops for a moment. The goggles distort everything, but he swears he can see  _ eyes _ on the thing open up.

Jesper is suddenly pushed backwards, the wind leaving his chest for a moment. His rifle, where’s his-

Something hits his chest. The blow clears his mind for a moment as he feels a rib  _ definitely  _ crack. “Sir, this is excessive, I’ll let you go if you-” Another hit, on the other side this time. “Dammit, I’ll let you go, just please stop-”

The blows stop. His vision finally clears enough that he can look up and see a face hovering above him, although blurry and unfocused. There’s a sharp whistle of air that may be a breath, and then a soft, rasping voice says, “Go to the Light. There’s a girl there who will need you soon.”

“ _ What? _ ”

A hand grabs onto his broken rib and  _ pushes _ , and for a moment all Jesper can do is hold his breath and stare at the string-lights turned stars. “Go to the Light. Take her where she needs to go.”

“I’ll take her where she needs to go,” Jesper echoes, and the pressure halts. He gasps for breath, wincing at the way his ribs pull with the effort. The figure above him flickers. Flickers?

What is he  _ dealing  _ with?

“When you cross back, call me.”

“Excuse me?”

The figure above him stops. There’s a slight rustling sound, and something heavy falls onto his chest. In the faint light, Jesper can see that it’s a small medallion. 

“Drop this into the water. I’ll meet you. Oh, and call my name.”

Suddenly, the weight holding Jesper down vanishes and he shifts, feeling his ribs where he was  _ sure  _ they were broken. There’s… no pain in his breath anymore. “Wait! What’s your name?”

The response is little more than a breath of wind that pushes his hair to the side. If he strains, he can hear a whisper of, “Kuwei.”

__

_ iii. _

Kaz is ambushed when he leaves the factory.

Most of the time, he lives a simple life. He goes through his day, reaches his production quota exactly - never more, never less - , picks up his rations every week, and limps up the steps to the worker’s bunks. When he walks he pulls his scarf tighter around his neck, both from the unrelenting chill and the fear of theft. These streets are known for their thieves, and although Kaz can neither confirm nor deny that he is one of them, he isn’t interested in trying to put all of his savings into buying a new one.

He has his ration bag slung over his shoulder, money hidden close in his pockets. It’s a gloomy day, the heat of the lights not lessening any of the chill. A faint wind stirs, drifting the smoke to the point it’s impossible to avoid.

“I have a deal for you,” a voice beside the door says. Kaz startles, shifting his grip on his cane to strike, if necessary. Too many thieves have seen the limp and the cane and assumed  _ easy target  _ that he swears it’ll never happen again. But instead of a potential mugger, he sees a small figure against the wall, huddled in a coat far too big for him. He’s far too sickly and pale to have anything worth making a deal.

“I’m not interested,” Kaz says, starting to walk away. There’s nothing a sick, starving kid could offer to him, another sick, starving not-quite-kid. “You should just go back to where you came from.”

“So should you,” the kid says, and Kaz slows his retreat. “I hear there’s a price on your head.”  
“That’s a funny rumor to hear.”

The kid snorts. If he would turn around, Kaz would bet there’s a stupid smirk on that face. Part of him is tempted to punch it off of him. “Of course, no one knows why. They say you stole something important from the King. Maybe even killed someone. It’s all speculation, but it’s quite a high price for a rumor.”

Kaz whips around, cane raised to strike. If this  _ kid _ knows about his status, he doesn’t want to know who in Ketterdam has also figured it out. He’ll have to trace the rumor all the way back and cut it off at its source, or maybe just leave town, and-

And what? And go through the wilderness and find a new town where he can get a new job in a new factory, slowly killing himself as his lungs become too polluted to even breathe?

His brother used to talk about the stars.

“Hey, slow down. You don’t need to kill me. I won’t tell anyone if you help me.”

He doesn’t trust him. Kaz shifts but doesn’t strike yet, keeping his posture tense. He’s an obvious threat and the kid knows it. “What kind of help?”

The kid pauses, tilting his head to the side. “A job. Medicine. Shelter.”

“That’s it?”

A job would be easy. The factories are always seeking new help as the older workers collapse. It doesn’t matter if they’re dead or too sick to work; both are the same in the end. Most factories provide housing for workers; not out of generosity, but as a way to keep their workers under control. Medicine might be harder, but that apothecary does owe him a favor...

A simple shrug in response. “I come from a simple place,” the kid says. “So, what do you say?”

It would be cleaner than killing him, Kaz does have to admit.

 

_iv._

“Have you ever been to the Dark?” Dunyasha asks her one night. Inej leans on her arm, close enough that she can  _ feel  _ the flush on her face from the wine that she holds in her other hand. 

“No,” Inej says, “And nor do I want to.”

The girl cradling her laughs, the sound in her chest harsh. “Why not? The lights are quite beautiful. Sure, it’s a bit ugly and dismal, but there’s good money to be made there.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she says, “They say there’s diamonds and buried kings to be found there.”

Inej is an acrobat. She lives in the wind and sky and feeds on the sun, and no amount of buried diamonds and ancient kings can convince her to bury herself underneath the mountain. “We are  _ not  _ going there for our honeymoon,” she says, and Dunyasha laughs again.

“Of course not. I’ve a beautiful villa out north where we can drink all of the wine we want,” she says as she drains the glass that she holds. “Speaking of wine, would you like more? Of course you would.” Without waiting, she untangles herself from Inej and stumbles out of the room, and Inej lets herself finally,  _ finally _ , drop her smile and flop back on the couch.

“She’s exhausting, isn’t she?” a voice says, and Inej startles up to see - 

To see a man leaning against the full-height window. He’s fuzzy around the edges, body obscured by a thin cloak, but she sees the blue of his eyes nonetheless. If she squints, she can see a faint shadow behind him that almost looks like - wings?

She must have drunk more wine than she thought.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, picking herself up off the couch. Intruders are not uncommon at the villa; Dunyasha is rich and her parents own a massive farm while the public suffers from famine, so of course thefts and attempted kidnappings are frequent. She tenses, begins to call for guards, and then she finds her air suddenly cut off. In the span of seconds the man moved to stand before her, frowning. She can  _ feel  _ the hands around her throat, but his arms hang at his sides. 

“Now, don’t do that,” he says, eyes narrowed. “I won’t hurt you unless you make me, and I’m not here for your money or for your life.” He stops for a moment, and then adds, “Or hers. As tempting as it may be. In fact, if you stay quiet, everyone will walk of here happily. Is that okay?”

Inej nods as best as she can. The hands release and she falls back, gasping. “What are you  _ doing here? _ ” she asks again between huffs.

The man sits beside her, stretching his legs in front of him. “Right, figured you’d ask this. My name is Matthias, and I have one simple question for you.”

“And that is?”

“Don’t you ever feel like you’ve been destined for something bigger than your skin?”

 

 

_ v. _

There’s always been something about the Dark that Nina loves. It’s always been fun to pull a hood over her head and pass through the crowds without being noticed, or to drift through the rooftops and catch the hopeless dreamers trying to make constellations out of loops of buzzing string lights.

Of course, when she says she “loves” it, there’s really a lot that she hates, but it’s best to make light of her situation.

Once upon a time people listened to her. Once upon a time she had a  _ body _ , a form that existed independently. Once upon a time she had a home.

Every night she stands on the highest building she can find and sings out her call. It’s weaker than it once was, but her words float nonetheless. If anyone can hear her, it’ll be the attempted stargazers.

And then,  _ finally _ , she hears an echo one night.

 

* * *

 

 

_ They say that, alone, in a fire-razed world where the only lights came from embers, the Oracle placed a hand on his forehead and he spoke for the last time, _

_ “One day - one day the mountains will recede and we will start anew. But first the halves must unite and untwist the history.” _

 

_ The Oracle simply frowned and faded back into the wind. _

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends! Thank you for reading this bizarre AU!! A few notes on the setting/plot of this:
> 
> \- The Light and the Dark are two distinct regions, separated by a large sea and harsh mountains. The Dark is, as one would expect, trapped in an eternal night-like state with mostly artificial light, while the Light is trapped in a mostly day-like state with short periods of darkness.   
> \- If you're familiar with Razia's Shadow, the inspiration comes from a mix of the original album and the Joe's Pub version (which is honestly just as good or better as the original version and you can Fight Me on that).  
> \- If you aren't familiar with either, I highly recommend listening. I've compiled a playlist [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcglJ0LgWY0&list=PL_ACo93c7tJeZNmIVCI8HBRQwlRO1iUMg) which is organized in approximate thematical order, or you can just listen on shuffle and enjoy some good jams. The Razia's Shadow album tracks are slightly pitch up to avoid copyright so just be aware if they sound a bit funny.
> 
> Happy reading!


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